A dozen carved signs from an eighth-century BCE tomb in Yerevan may preserve a forgotten writing tradition. A newly focused study brings them into view – and an undeciphered tablet from Georgia makes the mystery harder to ignore.
In 1984, construction work in the southern district of Yerevan unveiled a striking subterranean chamber built of finely dressed tuff blocks. Dated to the eighth century BC, the subterranean rectangular monument, measuring 3.46 by 1.97 by 2.15 metres, proved to be a monumental archaeological find: the only known monumental, stone-built Urartian tomb in the entire Caucasus region. Situated on Arshakunyats Avenue within the area now occupied by the ‘Yerevan Mall’ complex, the tomb was excavated by a joint team from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR and the ‘Erebuni’ Historical and Archaeological Museum-Reserve.
Its builders cut and paved the underground room with blocks of black, red, and dark-brown tuff. They carved niches into its walls, sealed it beneath heavy slabs, and left behind one of the most unusual funerary monuments known from the kingdom of Urartu.
Five niches punctuate the chamber. The quality of the masonry and the funerary assemblage point to a person or family of high status. This was not an improvised grave on the edge of an anonymous settlement; it was a carefully engineered monument in the cultural orbit of a royal fortress and regional center. Erebuni had been founded nearby by King Argishti I in 782 BCE, and the tomb belongs to the same broad century.
The discovery
While the tomb’s structural grandeur, five wall niches, and rich assemblage of ceremonial belts, weapons, and jewellery have been documented in previous archaeological literature, a crucial feature of its architecture remained largely unexplored. Engraved upon one of the massive stone blocks on the main façade and across two tuff fragments unearthed near the entrance is a sequence of enigmatic, unmapped symbols. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s description of Yerevan’s Urartian heritage calls it the only known monumental, stone-built Urartian tomb in the Caucasus.
The tomb itself was the headline when construction workers struck its roof in 1984. Yet its quietest clue was also its most provocative: a group of geometric signs cut into the entrance masonry and two broken stones found directly in front of the façade. For decades the marks sat at the edge of the scholarship – visible, occasionally sketched, but never studied as a group.
That changed with Urartologist Mikayel Badalyan’s 2025 study, “Unknown Script Signs from the Urartian Tomb of Yerevan,” the first focused attempt to document the carvings, identify repeated forms, and ask the unsettling question they pose: did ancient Yerevan preserve a writing system that we no longer know how to read?
A comprehensive study by scholar Mikayel Badalyan re-examines these mysterious carvings, offering compelling hypotheses that link the site to pre-Urartian tribal confederations, unknown Urartian writing, and the deep historical origins of medieval Armenian cryptography.
The clues everyone saw but no one studied
In his study, Badalyan identifies at least twelve distinct engraved signs preserved across three architectural elements: the upper portion of the third stone to the left of the tomb entrance façade, and two loose tuff fragments retrieved during excavations in front of the tomb. Notably, at least two of these signs appear to be repeated. In epigraphy, the deliberate repetition of specific character forms is a crucial diagnostic feature; it strongly implies that these markings are not random decorative doodles or quarry marks, but rather an underlying, structured writing system.
The physical typology of the signs is diverse. They consist of vertical and horizontal strokes, small dots, and distinctive angled shapes resembling ‘greater-than’ (>) and ‘less-than’ (<) chevron marks.
Even more intriguing is the second line of inscription on one of the recovered tuff fragments. There, two of the carved symbols are virtually identical to the Armenian letters č (Ճ) and g (Գ) as they were rendered in syunaketagir (‘column-dot writing’), a specialized form of medieval Armenian cryptography. Building upon these empirical observations, Badalyan argues that the inscriptions could represent an unrecognized writing system of Urartian or pre-Urartian origin. He suggests it may be tied to local indigenous populations such as the Etiuni confederation, or to captive populations relocated to the Ararat Plain during the expansion of the Urartian state.
Is it really a script?
This is where mystery can easily outrun evidence. A sign is not automatically a letter, and a set of signs is not automatically an alphabet. Ancient craftspeople used marks for ownership, accounting, workshop control, ritual, decoration, and many other purposes. Simple strokes and dots can also arise independently in unrelated places because they are easy to cut into stone.
The Yerevan carvings nevertheless have several features worth testing: linear arrangement, repeated forms, a limited visual repertoire, and more than one inscribed surface tied to the same monument. Badalyan cautiously describes the material as a possible writing system and even raises the possibility of alphabetic organization. But the surviving evidence cannot tell us the reading direction, distinguish signs from punctuation, or show whether a symbol represented a sound, syllable, word, number, or concept.
The safest formulation, then, is also the most interesting: these are unknown signs that may belong to an unknown script. Either outcome would matter. If the signs encode language, they would reveal a previously unrecognized strand of literacy in the ancient South Caucasus. If they are nonlinguistic notation, they would still illuminate how people marked identity, value, sequence, ritual, or ownership beyond the royal cuneiform record.
Who made them?
To understand the significance of the Yerevan tomb, one must look at the geopolitics of the Armenian Highlands during the Iron Age. In the eighth century BC, the Kingdom of Biai (Urartu) was consolidating its northern frontiers. When King Argishti I founded the fortress of Erebuni in 782 BC, Urartian royal inscriptions record that he resettled 6,600 warriors and captives from the western lands of Ḫate and Tsupani (Tsopk/Sophene) to populate and build his new citadel.
The region surrounding modern Yerevan, however, was far from uninhabited before the arrival of the Biainian kings. The Ararat Plain formed part of the territory of Waza, a constituent region of the powerful Etiuni tribal confederation. Excavations around the Yerevan tomb revealed that the eighth-century BC chamber was set into a much older landscape containing Early and Middle Bronze Age burials alongside Early Iron Age ceramic scatters. The site had long functioned as a sacred necropolis.
Could this script be connected to the Etiuni tribes or to their predecessors, the Trialeti-Vanadzor (TVC) and Lchashen-Metsamor (LMC) cultures? This possibility may be further supported by the discovery of very similar scripts in Georgia, a region that also fell within the cultural sphere of the TVC and LMC. Let’s explore this connection.
The most intriguing regional parallel comes from just across Armenia’s northern border. In the autumn of 2021, local residents fishing at the artificially impounded Bashplemi Lake in Georgia’s Dmanisi municipality found a flat, book-sized basalt tablet. A multidisciplinary team published the object in 2024 as the Bashplemi Lake tablet.
The primary study by Ramaz Shengelia and colleagues records a slab 24.1 centimeters wide and 20.1 centimeters high, made from local vesicular basalt. Its seven horizontal registers contain sixty signs, representing thirty-nine distinct forms. Microscopic examination suggests that the maker first drilled small conical depressions and then connected or smoothed them with a rounded tool or abrasive. The result is unmistakably deliberate.
The Bashplemi corpus is far larger than Yerevan’s, yet it is also undeciphered. Its exact date is not established because the tablet was found outside a controlled excavation. The authors consider a Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age date possible on graphic and archaeological grounds, but they explicitly leave the chronology open. News reports that give it a precise age should therefore be read with caution.
If the script is genuine and related to the markings found in the Urartian tomb in Yerevan, then a connection to Etiuni, or more broadly to the Trialeti-Vanadzor (TVC) and Lchashen-Metsamor (LMC) cultural traditions, is not implausible. After all, we would be dealing with roughly the same region and historical period. At the same time, the Urartian context itself should not be overlooked: the markings were found in an actual Urartian tomb, not merely in a tomb dating to the Urartian era. This makes it equally possible that they represent a still-undeciphered Urartian script or writing system. Several different scripts and systems of notation were used within the kingdom of Urartu, some of which I discussed in an earlier post, “Who Were the Urartians?”.
Architecturally, the subterranean chamber of Yerevan stands out. Built with five tiers of meticulously cut black, red, and dark brown tuff blocks and covered by five massive roof slabs, its interior layout features five storage niches and floor paving slabs concealing lower burial caches. The only comparable monumental stone tombs from the Urartian cultural sphere lie far to the west: at Altıntepe near Erzincan and at the recently recorded site of Gökçayır near Alashkert. Significantly, one of the elite stone tombs at Altıntepe contained a metallic funerary urn inscribed not in official Urartian cuneiform, but in Luwian hieroglyphs. This demonstrates that elite funerary monuments in the Urartian realm could accommodate non-cuneiform writing systems associated with distinct linguistic or regional backgrounds.
Ancient states rarely possessed only one way of recording information. Royal inscriptions were public and standardized, but everyday administration, craft production, religion, and funerary practice could preserve very different visual languages. The Yerevan marks may belong to one of those less visible traditions. Or they may represent a restricted notation system rather than continuous writing. At present, both possibilities remain alive.
Urartu is famous for royal cuneiform inscriptions: disciplined rows of wedge-shaped signs proclaiming kings, gods, fortresses, canals, and campaigns. The Yerevan marks look nothing like those official texts. That difference does not make them impossible; it makes their cultural setting more complicated.
Scholars have long catalogued non-cuneiform symbols on Urartian objects, including pottery, bronzes, seals, and building materials. Whether those marks formed full scripts, restricted notation systems, workshop signs, or several unrelated practices remains debated. A useful overview appears in Paul Zimansky’s chapter “Urartian and the Urartians”. The Yerevan fragments add an unusually concentrated group of signs from a monumental funerary context. They do not prove a second Urartian language or alphabet, but they widen the field of questions we can responsibly ask.
Why It Matters
The existence of an unmapped, non-cuneiform script on a primary Urartian elite tomb fundamentally challenges the traditional view that writing in the Iron Age Armenian Highlands was strictly confined to official Urartian cuneiform and royal Anatolian hieroglyphs [1].
If Badalyan’s primary hypothesis holds true, these signs represent a indigenous writing system preserved among the Etiuni confederation or introduced by the thousands of resettled populations from Ḫate and Tsupani. This would mean that vibrant local script traditions existed alongside official state cuneiform in the eighth century BC.
Furthermore, the morphological identity between the tomb’s glyphs and medieval syunaketagir cryptographic letters hints at an extraordinary cultural continuity. It raises the possibility that certain graphic traditions and symbolic scripts used in ancient Urartian necropolises survived across millennia, eventually being absorbed into the specialized scribal and cryptographic practices of medieval Armenian monks.
Conclusion
For almost forty years, Yerevan’s Urartian tomb was known as an architectural and funerary monument. The signs were present, but their story had not been assembled. Badalyan’s study does not decode them; its achievement is more fundamental. It defines the corpus, puts the evidence into circulation, and gives other specialists something concrete to challenge, refine, and compare.
The unexamined script signs from the Urartian tomb of Yerevan open an intriguing new chapter in the study of ancient literacy in the Armenian Highlands. Whether these markings prove to be an eighth-century BC Etiunian script, a product of secondary Urartian graphic system, or the distant ancestral roots of medieval Armenian cryptography, they demonstrate that ancient monuments still hold profound secrets. As the ‘Urartian Heritage of Yerevan’ advances on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List, this monumental stone chamber stands not only as an architectural masterpiece, but as a vital testament to the complex cultural tapestry of ancient Armenia.
References
- Badalyan, M. (2025a). Unknown script signs from the Urartian tomb of Yerevan. Historical-Philological Journal, 2025(3), 25-40. https://doi.org/10.54503/0135-0536-2025.3-25
- Badalyan, M. (2025b). Teishebaini: The Urartian heritage of Yerevan [in Russian]. De’Libri.
- Benzine, V. (2024, December 22). The unknown language on this ancient tablet continues to baffle experts. Artnet News.
- Biscione, R. (1994). Recent Urartian discoveries in Armenia: The columbarium of Erevan. Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 34, 115-135.
- Esayan, S. A., Biyagov, L. N., Hmayakyan, S. G., & Kanetsyan, A. G. (1991). Biainiyskaya grobnitsa v Erevane [The Biainian tomb in Yerevan]. Yerevan.
- Hakobyan, G. (2025, December 19). What secrets does the Urartian tomb on the grounds of Yerevan Mall contain? [in Armenian]. Aravot.
- McRae, M. (2024, December 17). Ancient tablet etched with mysterious language found in Georgia. ScienceAlert.
- Movsisyan, A. (2006). The writing culture of pre-Christian Armenia. Yerevan University Press.
- Shengelia, R., Gordeziani, L., Tushabramishvili, N., Poporadze, N., & Zourabichvili, O. (2024). Discovery of unknown script characters in Georgia: The Bashplemi Lake tablet. Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology, 11(3), 96-113. https://doi.org/10.14795/j.v11i3.1035
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (2025). The Urartian heritage of Yerevan.
- Yesayan, S. A., Biyagov, L. N., Hmayakyan, S. G., & Kanetsyan, A. G. (1995). The Biainian tomb of Yerevan [in Armenian]. Archaeological Monuments of Armenia, 16, 55-79.
- Zimansky, P. (2011). Urartian and the Urartians. In S. R. Steadman & G. McMahon (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of ancient Anatolia: 10,000-323 BCE (pp. 548-559). Oxford University Press.
This is so incredible – and if it turns out to be true, it supports the story Khorenatsi told about how Mashtots put together our alphabet as well. I can’t wait to see how this research continues to unfold, thank you so much for sharing!!